Thompson Divide Coalition

The Thompson Divide Coalition announced yesterday that Garfield County is supporting proposed legislation to protect the Thompson Divide. Hours later, the County denied that description… and said Commissioners said no such thing.

It was a day of dueling press releases. Around eleven A.M., the Coalition announced that commissioners with Pitkin, Gunnison and Garfield Counties are making a plea... to Republican Representative Scott Tipton to support pending legislation that would limit oil and gas development on the Thompson Divide.

A new report says there isn’t enough natural gas in the Thompson Divide to make it worth drilling. But the industry argues there aren’t enough facts to say if the leases would be a bust…

A new marijuana task force is meeting for the first time today. The goal is to monitor the effects of recreational pot on the Roaring Fork Valley.

The City of Aspen’s utility wants to run on 100-percent renewable energy and its enlisted the help of a government laboratory to help them get there. Aspen will inch closer to its renewable goal when it starts taking power from a new hydro plant in Ridgway later this month.

Local teenagers are getting a lesson on slam poetry. Two performance artists are visiting schools this week, teaching kids how to write and deliver “spoken word” poetry.

Finally, a Durango biathlete is competing in Sochi tomorrow. Her story is a unique one - she owes her Olympic bid to her twin sister.

There isn’t enough natural gas in the Thompson Divide to make it worth drilling… that’s the conclusion of a report by consultants hired by the Thompson Divide Coalition. The Carbondale group has been trying to buy oil and gas leases from drilling companies. An industry group, however, says there aren’t enough facts to say if Thompson leases would be a bust, and it accuses the Coalition of being disingenuous about its intentions.

I spend a lot of time trying to keep myself informed about current political affairs, but it often seems to be a futile effort. The same subject can be reported with wildly divergent information in competing publications. What is the poor reader to do? And how is the public to make any sense of this?

When citizens want to block oil and gas development on public land, they usually get a lawyer and head to the courts. In Carbondale, the Thompson Divide Coalition has taken another approach, choosing instead a game plan that is rarely used in the West. So far, the Coalition’s so-called “market-based” approach has yet to bear fruit. Aspen Public Radio's Marci Krivonen reports.